Film Reviews: A charming fable about family, human connection, and what it means to be an actor
Mari Yamamoto and Brendan Fraser in RENTAL FAMILY. Picture: James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures
★★★☆☆
(12A) stars Brendan Fraser as Philip Vanderploeg, an American actor living in Tokyo and struggling to land acting gigs.
Hired as ‘a token white guy’ for a mock funeral staged by Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira), Philip gradually finds himself warming to the idea of adopting fake personas in real-life scenarios, and comes to believe that he is playing a crucial role in helping people to establish the emotional connections they crave.
Until, that is, he’s hired to play ‘Kevin’, an American father to the young schoolgirl Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother Hitomi (Shino Shinozaki) is determined to create the illusion of a conventional family so that Mia might be accepted into a prestigious private school.
Philip is a loner with no family of his own; Mia desperately wants to reconnect with the father who abandoned his family when she was a baby; and from this point on, the story — written by
Hikari and Stephen Blahut, with Hikari directing — settles into some well-worn grooves.
But while the plot itself is fairly predictable, there’s much to enjoy in the film’s subtext, which effectively explores what it means to be an actor, and the extent to which everyone, paid or otherwise, is acting a part according to the world’s expectations and demands.
There’s also a strong performance from Brendan Fraser, who is quietly tragicomic as a clumsy oaf of an American blundering around making grand gestures in a culture that values precise formalities, and he gets good support from the young Shannon Mahina Gorman and Akira Emoto as the ageing actor Kikuo, with whom Philip strikes up a father-son relationship.
It errs on the sentimental side at times, but for the most part is a charming fable.
Theatrical release
★★★☆☆
Last year’s established a post-apocalyptic world in which zombies have evolved into super-predators. A direct sequel, (16s) focuses on Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who lives a solitary life in the wilderness building an ossuary from human bones to mark the deaths of those who have fallen.
When Kelson manages to subdue the alpha zombie Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) with an opiate-tipped blow dart, the pair strike up an unlikely relationship that suggests humans and zombies might learn to co-exist.
Alas, the Satan-inspired Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his merry gang of gore-loving lunatics are on the rampage and headed straight for Kelson’s temple of bones.
Written by Alex Garland and directed by Nia Costa, The Bone Temple is a less effective zombie horror than its
predecessor. Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell both put in deliciously lurid performances, but the Clockwork Orange schtick of Jimmy’s crew is overplayed, and the final act, when Kelson’s humane vision for the future collides with Sir Jimmy’s violent nihilism, is
visually impressive but otherwise
unconvincing.
Theatrical release
★★★★★
The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice last year, (15A) opens in a Red Crescent Call Centre in Ramallah on January 29, 2024, when Omar (Motaz Malhees) fields a call from six-year-old Hind Rajab, who is trapped in a car in Gaza that is being fired upon by the Israeli Defence Forces. Kaouther Ben Hania’s film charts the increasingly desperate attempts by Omar’s superiors Rana (Saja Kilani), Nisreen (Clara Khoury) and Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) to secure a clear rescue path for the terrified child. It’s a truly awful scenario, not least because it’s a dramatisation of real events, one elevated onto a whole other plane by Ben Hania’s decision to splice the recorded audio of Hind Rajab’s piteous pleadings into the film. Incredibly powerful, emotionally brutalising, this one will resonate deeply long after the credits roll.
Theatrical release
